Is it because I is bald?

'Can I see your identity card?'

It’s not really the sentence you want to hear from a security guard, particularly when the only available answer is ‘no’. My first evening in Hong Kong, and I was surfing on a wave of slightly manic energy. The game is to force your body to pretend that it really does believe that it’s 6pm, in spite of the day either being 5 hours long or 29 hours long, depending whether you considered that scant 4 hours of sleep to be an uncomfortable siesta or an overnight fractured sleep.

Trials for the new Economy Class
'Lard Arse' seat were going well

It’s after 6 to 8 hours in the same seat, with someone else’s chair pushed into your face and the disconcerting light from distant LCD screens, that your arse bones really start to complain. A fear of deep vein thrombosis is replaced by the casual concern that bedsores might be a possibility. Air New Zealand has many things to commend it, but a choice of movies in which ‘The Hopes & Dreams of Gazza Snell’ is first on the list of ‘classics’ is not one to brighten the spirit and have Barry Norman reaching for his quill. Apparently, there was a grand piano on the Hindenburg. Now that’s in flight entertainment. I bet that went down like a house on fire.

Insomniacs rejoice!

Anyway, back to the identity card. I was in the shopping area and was looking around, reacquainting myself with its singular charms, when I was approached by two policemen. The conversation, almost Wildean in its coruscating energy, went like this;

Policeman 1: Can I see your identity card?

Me (our noble hero, fighting against the brutality of the police state): No, my passport is in my hotel room.

Policeman 2: Can I see your identity card?

Me (aha! They won’t fool me, playing this good cop / bad cop interrogation technique): No, it’s in my hotel room.

Policeman 1: Can I see your identity card?

Me (this one’s for the people. Rise up! Rise up! You have nothing to lose but your chains!): (looking through pockets, rifling through wallet) I’ve got my credit card and my hotel pass…

Policeman 2: You don’t have your identity card?

Now at this point two things fluttered through my mind.

1.    No wonder Chinese police are feared worldwide for their Poirot-esque intuition and deep understanding of the criminal mentality

2.    Was I about to be dropped into a Kafkaesque world of lost identity and bureaucratic entanglement by my two Sino Centurions?

Policeman 1: You come with me

Stony-eyed defender of the state

And off he scuttled, I knew not where. I could have made a run for it, but I was wearing flip flops, and I didn’t feel it would be terribly sophisticated to be arrested in flip flops. If I’m going down, I’m going down in Dune, I assure you.

He looked back, and barked again. ‘You come with me’, and I followed. I was determined not to travel at his scuttling pace and deliberately affected an English stroll, as perfected by years of colonialism. Every ten paces he would look back, fretting at my ‘oh look, a butterfly’ disinterest. This is how the proletariat fights back against the granite-faced carborundal oppressors of the state... This was I, standing shoulder to shoulder with Marx, Guevara and Ricky Tomlinson. I was half way through the Red Flag already… ‘The people’s flag is deepest red…’ I began, then remembered I was in a communist state. I didn’t want to look like a lickspittle lackey of the totalitarianists.

There are another six verses of this, you know...

Up two flights of stairs and along a corridor, we came upon the police offices. An officer sat behind a desk. Policeman 1 ululated at him in Cantonese. He addressed a question to me, one probably embedded deep within the masonry of the building, probably one the desk itself could have voiced.

Policeman 3: Can I see your identity card?

I confess I was starting to find this funny, although the possible outcomes worried me. I was taken to another, smaller room and asked the same question, this time by three police officers. But then, just as the tale started to lose its dramatic narrative, there was a twist;

Policeman 5: What is the number on your identity card?

Me: I don’t know

Policeman 5: Why not?

Me: (slightly baffled) Because we don’t need them in the UK.

Ha! Take that, Pol Pot! It’s Winston Smith standing up against O’Brien! Orwell would be proud.

This is how it was. Honestly.

Policeman 6: Is this your identity card?

And they showed me the identity card of a man with whom I had only two things in common. I was Gwailo – white (literally, a ghost person), and I was bald. Nothing else linked us beyond our gender. He was fat, had glasses, and was younger than I. I laughed, told them it was somebody else’s identity card, and pointed to where my glasses should be. I got out my credit cards and pointed out the different name. I didn’t quite go so far as to point out the meso- as opposed to the endomorphic comparisons of our corporeal stature, but I was tempted.

How I look to a Chinese policeman

How I look to me

I said something along the lines if ‘is it because I is bald?’, and Policeman 1 laughed.

Policeman 6 laughed. Policeman 5 laughed. Policeman 1 apologised profusely. I was led out to the outer office where Policeman 3, once the situation had been explained, laughed along. We were all becoming best friends and Policeman 1 was still apologising. On arrival downstairs, Policeman 2 found considerable amusement in the account.

So we ended the whole farrago as bosom pals and by having added to the total sum of hilarity in the world.

But that’s not how it seemed at the start. And I’m only sorry I didn’t manage to fart in their office as a final act of defiance against the police state.

‘Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, We’ll keep the red flag flying here…’

Your tourism mission… should you choose to accept it…

(To save myself a bit of typing from now on, I’m going to use the international sign IDR for rupiah – InDonesian Rupiah. Thank you for your understanding)

Mountain. Distance. Mists.

First stop – we had to see ‘the volcano’. Little was I to know that two weeks later, volcanoes would become a very big thing in Indonesia. At this time it was just something to see. We drove for 1½ hours. In the last 15 minutes the clouds descended and the mists rolled in reducing visibility to naff all. Perfect.

We parked at a good viewing spot, perhaps 5 miles from the volcano, and dutifully took pictures. I wasn’t over-impressed. See one mountain, you’ve seen them all, and I want my volcanoes to be like they were in my World of Wonder Annual, 1971, spewing molten lava and coated in dense clouds of smoke (rather too prescient, sadly). This was a big hill with a few clouds.

Statue with skirt. That's a
lot of material...

More fascinating to me were the silly details. Why did every statue have a skirt on? Why did most cars and motorbikes have raffia fascinators bedecking their radiators and wing mirrors?

It turns out that Bali is the island of the gods – Pulau Dewata. Everything has a ceremony and every day has something new to celebrate. The predominant religion is Hinduism, and today we were being treated by a day to pray for modes of transport. Our taxi driver was having his wife’s family over later so they could decorate all their cars together, and pray for them.

Someone's been practising their raffia work

I don’t mean to be sacrilegious or to mock others’ beliefs, but I was momentarily reminded of that episode in ‘Father Ted’ where Ted explains to Dougal that God probably doesn’t have a Saint whose job it is to look over Pop-Tarts, that would be silly. That job was probably handed out to an angel or such like, whose role would include all types of breakfast cereal.

We were about to drive off again when we were stopped by a man with a whistle and a stick. We’d parked in his parking area, and he’d specifically whistled to make sure people stopped while we were parking and he was about to whistle to let us pull out. Kind man. He wanted his fee, which was IDR1,000 – about 8p. I wasn’t going to argue.

Our lovely restaurant. Bill not shown

We also stopped for lunch in a restaurant with a view of the clouds that masked the mountain. The food on offer was fly-ridden buffet, that had presumably been sitting there for as long as was needed to draw in the phototourists and the Canon fodder. It was the most expensive meal that I’d had since arriving in Indonesia. A tourist trap, at last. I’d got what I wanted.

Restaurant toilet. Hygiene certificate not shown

We left the restaurant and looked for our driver. It was raining heavily, there were dozens of identical cars, and my companion and I looked at each other. Neither of us knew the registration number of the car or had taken the trouble to find out the taxi driver’s name. Nor what make of car it was. We gazed at the line of cars, receding into the mists, like a Ford Dagenham car park…

Could things get any better? At least I wasn’t in Karawaci. I was happy.

Bali... 36 hours and counting...

What was Bali like? Hard to tell. It was something of a staging post between two airport visits, in many ways.

Having spent weeks in the grimness of Stalag Karawaci, anywhere would have been a breath of fresh air, so perhaps Bali was wasted from that point of view. Southend would have been a delight, frankly.

In my time in Indonesia, I’ve now been on four Garuda Airline flights (the national airline) and not one of them has left anywhere near on time. We finally arrived at our hotel at 2am, hardly feeling at our best, and were immediately garlanded with flowers and offered fruit punch. Yippee.

Do I look like I
need a garland?

The hotel was indeed amazing. I was told that my room had been upgraded into one overlooking the sea. If you looked carefully enough you could, indeed, just see the sea through the trees, but that was an estate agent speaking there. I wasn’t going to complain, though.

The view from the sea. Spot
the 'sea view' hotel

The change from Karawaci was absolute. There was space, clean air, things to see and do and yes, an industry that had grown up around tourism.

There was an urgency in the air. Basically there was one free day. How to fill it with THINGS? Bali was full of STUFF. It had EXOTICA. What if I came back from Bali and hadn’t ticked off a single THING on the MUST-SEE checklist? I’d never be able to live down the shame.

The hotel had a tourism officer. What did we want to do? We explained about THINGS and STUFF and EXOTICA and the MUST-SEE checklist and he nodded sagely. He could satisfy all our whims and he would book us in for the 8.30am trip tomorrow. No, no! we cried. This was URGENT – there was only today.

A tremor of concern crossed his brow, made a right turn at his integrity lobe and reverse parked in the section of his cerebellum marked ‘profit’. No problem, of course it was no problem. His friend would be at the hotel in 10 minutes to pick us up. For two of us it would cost 850,000 rupiah – about £70. For that we would get our English-speaking taxi driver guide all day and he would take us to… at which point I glazed over. I’d see it when I get there. I allowed the ‘keen and grateful’ look, honed in years of marriage, to engrave itself on my face.

The game was up. Let slip the dogs of tourism…

Indo in mini

Sometimes it’s the smallest things that give you perspective. A friend and myself were in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (a sort of theme park but stranger than that – more details in a later blog) and it was raining. We decided that the rain had eased enough to keep wandering if we could find an umbrella.

Amongst all the stalls selling Mr Bean nodding dolls, bubblegum-pink toy guns and plastic Stetson hats, not a single one had the foresight to sell an umbrella. Not one. In a country where for much of the year it rains every day, none of these enthusiastic and intelligent vendors had thought to stock a gamp for the benefit of foreign visitors.

I managed with a paper round...

Small children would hire you an umbrella and then walk behind you, drenched to the skin, but with your rupiahs stuffed into waterproof bags.

So why could they manage one entrepreneurial venture but not the other? Let me give you another anecdote…

My mission seemed simple enough. I had been in Karawaci (a suburb of Jakarta) for three days and had found nothing except for the hotel and a shopping centre (with Debenhams, MacDonald’s, Burger King and Domino’s… hardly an authentic equatorial bazaar). There must be something more, there must… there were so many people staying in this hotel, surely a tourist industry had grown up around the rich bule.

Hotel Aryaduta. Smell the
money

I went to the hotel reception and addressed the receptionist in my best bahasa. ‘Selamat siang’ I started. ‘Is there something to do round here? Perhaps somewhere to visit or something to see?’ The receptionist looked a little bemused. ‘Well, there’s the shopping centre…’ she started uncertainly.

Yes, that's security and
a metal detector.
Take no chances...

‘Yes, I know,’ I smiled. ‘But something to see… something to do?’ The bemused look didn’t leave her face, but settled like a comfortable visitor who finds the cushions on your sofa exactly to his liking.

What passes for a tourist
hotspot in Karawaci

‘Err… no.’ And that was that. No other suggestions, no ideas of who to talk to, not even an offer of a hotel car to take me to some tourist trap.

There’s something charmingly naïve about the Indonesian attitude to tourists. I don’t want this to sound like they’re ignorant or stupid, they just don’t seem able to make that mental adjustment to see themselves as others see them.

They are unfailingly polite and always pleased to see you. They work hard when they need to and are charming and helpful. When they turn, though, they can be extraordinarily violent and internecine. Last week a police officer was killed in Papua when he got into an argument with his ex-brother in law. During the course of the argument, he was called a ‘thief’.

The village had had a spate of thefts recently and, hearing this, the villagers rounded on the police officer. He was severely beaten and, when he was rescued and taken to a safe house, the villagers broke into the house and beat him to death. On nothing more than a man’s word.

In Java last week, one Muslim group burnt a mosque to the ground and beat those who were inside, because they belonged to a different Islamic sect and outside South Jakarta District Court, rival gangs fought each other with machetes, guns and bows and arrows – surprisingly, only two died, but in gruesome ways.

Rather more bizarrely, two of the toughest gangs in town came head to head recently – the Indonesian Bar Association, which is formally recognised as the only authorised lawyers guild, and the rival Indonesian Advocates Congress. In the UK would this be a problem? They might make cutting remarks about each other’s perukes or the membership list of their golf clubs, but that’s about it. Here it was the start of a mass brawl with hundreds of them joining in.

I know, I know what you’re thinking – ‘quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’. I know, I know. Quis indeed.

How half of the other half lives

So we left the travelogue with me full of beer and ayam goprek bakar, in a car driven by a houseboy, being driven to meet the parents of a teenager that my colleague and I had only really known for 6 hours.

Confused? You might have to go back a few episodes of this blog, to ‘Jakarta in a day’ to get the full picture. It’s worth it, I assure you.

We ended up in Cempaka Putih (I don’t know what it means, but the second word means ‘white’), driving down a scruffy dual carriageway with fairly large houses glowering in a self-satisfied way onto the road. Eventually we turned into a cul-de-sac with houses off each side. Parking up, we entered through a sliding security gate and then we met Angke’s parents.

We already knew a certain amount of what to expect. Angke had a fairly strict upbringing. Every evening that she wasn’t working in the hotel she had to be home by 8pm. She hadn’t had a boyfriend, only had a sip of alcohol once in her life, but oddly, had had her first cigarette aged 5. Her father was a chain-smoking Indian man who worked in finance and her mother used to be a cabaret singer and still played the piano.

I think that’s probably more facts than I know about most of my friends… it had been that sort of a day so far.

We were welcomed warmly, and offered coffee. Good coffee. Very good coffee, but apparently not the best; ‘look out for kopi luwak’, her mother told us (Luwak coffee). The younger sister said hello, then scuttled off, not to reappear while we were in the house. My colleague noticed a cabinet full of small perfume bottles.

‘My wife collects things,’ the father told us, just a twinge at the corner of his eye betraying the enormity of the pain behind that simple sentence. There were other, larger perfume bottles elsewhere; in all, perhaps 200 or more. ‘That’s why we have so many cats,’ he went on. ‘I hate cats’. Here, clearly, was a man beset by fortune. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a wife who collects cats, surely.

Russian cat. Price tag
withheld for legal reasons

‘Would you like to see the cats?’ the mother asked. But of course. Downstairs, in a side room, were four cages and an electric piano. Inside one cage was a huge white ball of fluff with legs – this was apparently an expensive Russian cat.

Now I’m no lover of cats, but I especially have a problem with those snub-nosed ones. There’s something anti-evolutionary about them, something that suggests that ‘survival of the fittest’ needs to have a sub-clause to include inbred animals that are ugly and serve no useful purpose somehow managing to keep their Speedos dry whilst paddling in the gene pool.

Apparently the word 'cat' is
applicable. Apparently.

Our driver’s bedroom was room next door. Bless him, he had pictures of Liverpool Football Club and Fernando Torres on the walls, and a hundredweight of fur in a skin bag in a corner. This, my friends, is what the world calls a Maine Coon. It’s just ridiculous, and apparently its genus classifies it as felis catus. Domestic cat. Subspecies wolf.

Upstairs there was a whole room of cats in cages. Now I appreciate that if these cats were allowed to roam free in Jakarta they wouldn’t last a day and that here they were cared for and healthy (recessive genes notwithstanding), but I couldn’t help feeling uneasy in this room. Time to go.

Awwww....

Comments seem superfluous here

The triumph of self-image
over reality

Next generation on the way

We said our fond goodbyes and promised to look after their daughter.

Angke took us briefly to the antiques market in Jalan Surabaya where an enthusiastic salesman tried to sell me a gong weighing about 50 kilos. No matter that it was going on a plane. He’d wrap it up. That’s ok then.

The view from the back of a
bajay. Tax disc not pictured.

A brief journey in a bajay – a three wheeled motorised rickshaw that laughs in the face of MOTs and giggles inanely while sophistication glances the other way, then beers in Jalan Jaksa (Jaksa Street) and then we were off home, confused, bewildered, slightly disorientated but happy.

Why Jalan Jaksa? Angke wanted to take us to the place where the bule (white people) hang out. She thought it would be nice for us. Considerate girl… she’ll go far.